Margaret Spufford – författare

Spufford tells the story of her daughter, who was born with a rare metabolic disease, and the story of her own struggle with chronic pain. An unflinching look at faith and prayer in the face of pain and physical evil.

This book is a detailed history of the economic, educational and religious life of three contrasting communities, Chippenham, Orwell and Willingham in Cambridgeshire from 1525 to 1700. The three villages had very difference economic settings, in which the pattern of landholding changed over this period and the general and particular reasons for the changes that took place. The study also covers the educational opportunities open to the villagers, and examines religious affairs, the effect on peasant communities of the Reformation and the disturbance in the devotional life of the ordinary villager, which often culminated in dissent and disruption under the Commonwealth. Dr Spufford has penetrated into the social life of the English village at all levels, and with fascinating detail has created a whole social universe around her villagers or a 'picture in the round' view. The book will be invaluable to economic, social, and ecclesiastical historians of England in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, as well as historians of Britain generally, and those with a special interest in Cambridgeshire.

Attention has increasingly turned in recent years from the economic and agricultural framework of the life of the English villager in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries to his or her social and mental world. Margaret Spufford's interest in literacy, and particularly in the ability to read, which laid the villager open to all sorts of external influences other than those coming from the pulpit and the manor house, has led her in this book to examine both the spread of reading ability, and one of the principal forms of cheap print available in the late seventeenth century at a price within the reach of the day labourer. Many historians, notably history of education specialists, had not realized the extent of elementary schooling and the consequent existence of a mass readership and a popular literature created especially for it before the Charity School movement. This book provides them with a radical new emphasis. Dr Spufford's book examines the profits made by these publishers, the scale of their operations, and the way the 'small books' were distributed throughout the country. It also examines their content, and compares the English chapbooks with their French counterparts. By so doing, the author throws light on one of the influences at work on the seventeenth-century villager, and illuminates some of the concepts and imagery that formed the imaginative stock-in-trade of the man behind the plough.

There has been dispute amongst social historians about whether only the more prosperous in village society were involved in religious practice. In this 1995 book, a group of historians working under Dr Spufford's direction have produced a factual solution to this dispute by examining the taxation records of large groups of dissenters and churchwardens, and have established that both late Lollard and post-Restoration dissenting belief crossed the whole taxable spectrum. We can no longer speak of religion as being the prerogative of either 'weavers and threshers' or, on the other hand, of village elites. In her own substantial chapter Dr Spufford draws together the mosaic constructed by the contributors, adds radical ideas of her own, and disagrees with much of the prevailing wisdom on the function of religion in the late seventeenth century. Professor Patrick Collinson has contributed a critical conclusion to the volume.

How did the ’peasantry’ of early modern England react to the Reformation and to subsequent changes in their churches? Were they involved in founding dissenting churches? Could they even read? And if so, what was available for them? This volume brings together a key set of papers on such subjects by one of the foremost recent English social historians. Margaret Spufford has been a pioneer, in the particular social ’landscape’ of early modern England, of the techniques of ’total history’, and her work has helped shift the historical understanding of seventeenth-century commoners away from merely economic models and toward a perspective in which religious, cultural, educational and geographical factors are also seen as integral parts of the environment of the past.

Margaret Spufford has written as detailed an account of the lives and activities of the chapmen as there is likely to be, given the widely-spread and fragmented evidence. She shows where and when they were active, and in particular their rise in the 17th century, their ranks and their typical careers, the variety of the cloths and other wares they carried, and the attitude of authority towards them.